The thing that seems to stand out to me about the Twins and their draft is that they consistently seem to get useful Major Leaguers out of the draft, and don’t seem to miss too often on their high level picks. Clearly the cream of the crop has been Joe Mauer, Torii Hunter, and Justin Morneau, who are all multiple award winners. Looking at their first round picks over the last 15 years, a majority of them have played in the Majors, and quite a few of them have made it to the Majors with the Twins as well.

International Free Agency

The Twins don’t visit the international markets a lot, mostly because it costs money to get the top prospects from foreign countries. That said, they still have done reasonably well, with Wilson Ramos being one of the top prospects in their system right now, and a solid reliever in Jose Mijares. The most recent signing of note for the Twins is Dominican SS Miguel Angel Sano, who was scouted by many teams and nearly signed a couple of times. I’d like to see more players come out of the international markets before I think it’s been a complete success, but the Twins have done alright here to this point.

Overall Grade

B-. The Twins have done very well to not only scout and develop a lot of high quality players, but have also managed to keep a lot of them and used their farm system to replenish themselves when they need to as well. The only reason that they aren’t really higher up in my rankings is because the bench is so unusually weak for a team with the amount of success that the Twins have had. Also, I think that their inability to translate these groups of players into a championship is a bit of a knock on them, but overall their performance has still been good.